It’s a handy means of generating for ourselves ideas for personal and community and national change.

One way I’ve devised of talking about some critical everyday regularities is what I call the Green Triangle. However chaotic they sometimes seem, they have patterns we can actually make sense of the ways things work, and react accordingly. But it is also reassuringly true of our daily lives.

This goes for science almost without saying, since without prediction of regularities it is impossible to devise experiments. Luckily, although we may sometimes lose the faith, on the whole it works to assume that the universe displays many reassuring regularities that we can rely on. And what we say needs to have both human verve and internal logical coherence to be memorable – more than a cafeteria menu of 50 or 750 ecological things we ought to choose among. Is it possible to talk attractive sense about a new life style for Americans? It had better be, or we can start preparing a suitable tombstone for our nation. (I know, he looks better and better now, doesn’t he?) Jimmy Carter may have been our only recent president to understand that an equation has two sides, but his wan demeanor on TV in a sweater, urging us to save energy, did not exactly inspire the American people. But so far nobody has been able to dramatize this on a national level in the folksy, convincing way that Ronald Reagan and Ivan Boesky made greed respectable. Living a sane and ecologically responsible life doesn’t mean self-sacrifice and austerity on the contrary, it should mean a richer, more interesting, fuller, longer, and healthier life. In fact, doing the right thing for the Earth can have multiple unexpected benefits. Does living a more ecologically sound life have to pinch? Not at all, says Ernest (Chick) Callenbach, author of Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

Ecotopia emerging